Friday, October 14, 2011

The Buffett Rule Act for The Undertaxed Among Us

ROLL CALL -- "Congressional Republicans are countering President Barack Obama's attempt to raise taxes on millionaires, and they are appropriating his proposal's name to do it.

Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) and Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), backed by anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist, introduced the Buffett Rule Act last week. The bill would instruct the IRS to add a check box on 1040 forms for taxpayers to indicate that they want to voluntarily pay extra. In a statement, Thune said the bill would make it easy for people to pay more to the Treasury if they believe they are undertaxed.

"If individuals like Warren Buffett or President Obama are inclined to donate their own personal money toward paying down the federal government's debt, they ought to have that right to do so voluntarily," he said."

MP: As I pointed out before, the statutory IRS federal income tax rates are not fixed, binding, or maximum tax rates, they are merely minimum tax rates. Advocates of higher taxes like Buffett seem to imply that they are somehow helpless or constrained by the current tax code, when they can easily resolve their apparent frustration of being "undertaxed" by paying higher taxes voluntarily.

We could double the tax on the top 1% and still be about $1,000,000,000,000 in the hole for this year. We'd have to tell Buffett and the OWS protester to figure out how to come up with the rest.

I am not in the top 1%, but with nearly 50% of the country thinking it's ok to take on persons income and give it to someone else simply because the someone else exists and "needs" it I'm sure I'll eventually make it into the "we need your money more than you do" category.